The Atlanta Regional Commission announced the 2014 recipients of the Livable Centers Initiative grants yesterday. Among the recipients were the neighboring cities of Avondale and Clarkston. Here are the descriptions of the grants for the two cities…

City of Avondale Estates, $50,000, to study the feasibility of a roundabout, road diet and “Better Block” demonstration project.
City of Clarkston, $80,000, for a major plan update.

This is the second straight year that Avondale has received a grant. In 2013, the city received a grant for a “major plan update and a downtown master plan”.

I sure hope this is for the College Avenue / N Avondale Road corridor. What GDOT did to that city, while not at all uncommon, drove no shortage of nails into downtown’s coffin and has hindered any meaningful sense of resurrection ever since.

That car sewer is so unpleasant that the residential side erected a big green buffer just so they could live peacefully in denial that the road even exists, while their downtown plan, just to provide an enjoyable pedestrian environment, had to shift a full block off “Main Street.”

Of course, if they do pull off a retrofit, they’ll become greater competition for investment in Decatur but, hey, a rising tide lifts all boats!

Having taken part in the Master Plan update, it was pretty much a given that the Town will push GDOT to allow the town to road diet N. Avondale/College and add bike lanes, curbs and streetscape. An unmentioned bit is that because of the new billboard law, I doubt we could get nice tree plantings along a lot of the stretch due to a few billboards–several seem to be within the City limit pre-annexation. But bike lanes, drainage and sidewalks—at least that would be something. The roundabout concepts already put forward are very interesting. It would really change the “Town Green” buffer between Clarendon and Berkeley. However, all of this will be WAY in the future since AE will not have the resources to do it all ourselves. But maybe we can have a project down for the next T-Splost vote (har har).